The rhythms of life

To everything, there is a season: an ode to seasonality.

Photo by Bernd Schulz on Unsplash

A time to grow, a time to die.

A time to thrive, a time to wilt.

A time to connect, a time to contract.

Just like the Byrds famous 1965 hit, everything has a time, a season.

Life without seasons would be dull.

I often dread winter. The darkness. The cold. The shortness of the days.

But it is this period that makes spring so absolutely wonderful. I am in awe of the life I am surrounded by¹. The speed at which things are changing. The colour. The vibrancy. The vigour.

Plants are fighting to be smelt, fighting to outgrow their neighbours.

Even the weather is vibrant. It teases us. The early hot spells that bring life. The cold snaps that follow. And the wild nor'westers.

Just like plants that are emerging from their winter stupor, we emerge from our wintery haze.

Such is life.

Life is rhythmic. These ups and downs help animals, plants, microbes and us thrive.

Just like a cicada emerging from its underground home and shedding its skin, I happily shed my winter wetsuit. It's time gliding along the Scarborough waves has come to a seasonal close. The return of the Antipodean Autumn will see it once again accompanying my surfboard.

At the same time, cottonwoods in the American West shed their leaves. Mayflies inhabiting the flowing water beneath their magnificent gallery forests happily receive their waste. Shredders shred, filter feeders filter feed and fish do what fish do — dine on the shredders and filter feeders. They've all timed their life cycles to match this massive influx of organic matter, capitalising on its predictable timing.

These same barren trees emerge with life a few months later.

And they wait.

Patiently.

For the sun. For the warmth. And for the melting of the snows.

To some, this melting snow brings devastation. Rivers burst at the seams. Wiping out the shredding and filter feeding insects living on their stones. Snapping branches of the shrubs clinging to their margins. Washing away carabid beetles waiting to be fed by emerging mayflies. And sometimes damaging infrastructure.

To the cottonwoods, though, these floods are expected, anticipated, awaited. For them to send their genes downstream.

These majestic trees have experienced similarly timed melting snows for thousands of years. So this expectation has evolved — selected for through evolution.

Seeds are released in synchrony with the meltwater to be transported to new places. To places where life was previously taken. To bare ground.

And the cycle starts again.

Yes, rivers have rhythms. They follow the tilt of the earth. This rhythmicity brings life in all its glory².

But what happens when these rhythms change? What happens when snow gets replaced by rain in the Rockies? What happens when the snow melts earlier? What happens when a dam disrupts these rhythms?

Well, that's a story for another day.

Some places, like New Zealand, beat to a less rhythmic drum.

We sit in the middle of a big ocean and wait for storms to roll in off the Southern Ocean. For the Roaring Forties to bite. And for the floods to come.

Any time of the year.

Unlike the mayflies of North America, whose hatches block bridges, whose hatches delight fly fishermen, ours are more tempered, more reserved, more anxious.

Large collection of spent mayflies. Have you ever seen footage of mayflies clogging bridges along the Mississippi River because literally billions of the same species have emerged all at once. Yep, the entire species can be so synchronised in their emergence timing that they can all emerge across their entire range within hours. Image credit: Steve Creek.

It's hard to capitalise on something that's not there. So instead of putting all their eggs in one basket like the cottonwood tree does in the Colorado, they manage risk — they hedge their bets. Many cohorts trickle out throughout the year.

When a catastrophic flood arrives, the whole species doesn't disappear at once.

Their species lives to see another day. Another year. Another generation. An evolutionary adaptation that protects them from the muted rhythmicity.

But how many more anomalous years can they survive? And how many more mistimed snowmelt floods, wildfires, droughts can the cottonwoods survive?

Again, that's a question for another day.

But, for now, I’m off to don my spring suit. The waves are calling.

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This is a slight deviation from my usual, more dry, content. Hope you like it. If you do, I might try to write more like this on an infrequent basis. Let me know!

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Related reading

1. I was going to post this in spring, but it's now deep in summer and things are equally unpredictable.

2. Stay tuned for an exciting new paper sometime in the next few months on this topic.